Posts tagged with "pavilions":

In less than a month, a dozen sukkahs will descend on Union Square, part of the first annual Sukkah City celebration, a modern take on an ancient Jewish structure/holiday thought up by writer Joshua Foer and Reboot founder Roger Bennett. We first revealed the project back in the spring, and now the winning sukkahs have been selected. We spoke with Foer about the entrants, the process, and the winners, a few of which we even managed to scare up (though the rest are being saved for a certain newspaper in another square uptown).
Foer told us in the spring that he hoped to thoroughly investigate the complexity and variety found within the relatively strict confines of the sukkah, a ritual harvest structure. These include as that it be certain dimensions, made from organic material, and impermanent. Foer said he was blown away with the results.

We had over 600 entrants, so it was really a diverse set of answer to how this structure could be imagined. Some designers engaged with the idea of ephemerality. Some engaged directly with the idea of collective memory, a structure meant to provoke collective memory. Some engaged with the idea that the structure confront social justice issues. [...] Some of the structures were just little beautiful jewels that are just stunning little pavilions. The idea is that the 12 together will speak to the diversity of responses. It's not the 12 best sukkahs but the one best sukkah city.

Even though the competition was open to Jews and gentiles alike, and there were entries from 43 countries, one can't help but wonder if therein lies the explanation for so many New York City firms—as Alvy Singer might say, we New Yorkers all a little Jewish. Of the three entries we've actually seen, Rael San Fratello's is probably the most interesting. The Suttle, Sugita, and Nguyen entry, Gathering, seems to fall into Foer's first category, of challenging the temporal nature of Sukkot, with a wooden structure that can take on countless shapes, never being the same twice, constantly shifting and relocating and redefining itself, like the Jews. THEVERYMANY's P.YGROS.C / passive hygroscopic curls seems to be a clear example of the jewels, a lustrous green gem, a challenge of formalism, to be marveled at from inside and out as it redefines itself around its environment.
Yet it is Sukkah of Signs that is most audacious in its scope and, we imagine, shape, as it tackles ">tikkun olam. Rael and San Fratello have gone about collecting signs from homeless people in the Bay Area and, with the help of volunteers, from across the country, in what they're calling "The Homeless House Project." Somehow, they're going to repurpose these into a sukkah, a challenge we can't wait to see in action. Best of all, as Foer points out, "It's really great because they're basically transferring their award money to the homeless population," as each sign is gotten in exchange for a donation.
As for construction, well, that's something Foer wonders about with a number of the winners. "They're all 100 percent kosher structures, designed in consultation with rabbis and structural engineers," he said. "A couple of winners, I'll be impressed if they can pull it off."
Sukkah City arrives in Union Square September 19 and 20. Once designs are unveiled next month on the Sukkah City website, voting will commence for the "people's sukkah," which will remain in the square for all eight days of Sukkot. For the rest of the holiday, the remaining structures will be dispersed to sites across the city, extending the celebration far and wide.

Now that the pavilions have begun arriving at the Grand Canal, that other great architectural exhibition of the summer has faded into memory. No, we're not talking about the one in Pasadena. Or at P.S.1. Not the Serpentine. This would be the Shanghai World Expo, which did have some pretty great pavilions upon its opening in June. Not among them, sadly, was the U.S. Pavilion, in large part because we refused to front the money for the structure, and so it got farmed out. Now, Marketplace has a report from the pavilion that pretty perfectly encapsulates the problems and perseverance of the little pavilion that couldn't, even how it has won over many Chinese, what with their love with propaganda and irony.

No, not the Fascists—that was 2008, when the Northern League held its national rally at the entrance gates of the biennale giardini. I mean the architects! They have arrived in droves, and it’s easy to spot them walking along the Grand Canal absorbing the searing heat and humidity of August in Venice. The second day of reading press releases, walking the giardini, and visiting collateral exhibitions reaffirms my sense that there is more art in the 2010 biennale than architecture. This is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing, and many of these installations do consider architectural questions. But it makes one wonder why national pavilions make the decisions they do about the architectural conditions in their country.
Still, there is architecture to be seen in the giardini if one looks carefully. The Austrian pavilion, despite its thin premise, has wonderful architectural models and a fascinating central space designed by curator Eric Owen Moss. Elsewhere, the British pavilion has a beautiful-looking installation (glimpsed through a crack in the door) by MUF that looks like a 19th-century teaching hospital; the Germans seem to be showing a long line of architectural drawings on the wall; the Czech Republic is presenting an exciting wooden wonderland of form; and the Japanese pavilion, curated by SANAA partner Ryue Nishizawa, looks to have an installation on metropolitan Tokyo. Finally, the U.S. pavilion’s Workshopping project promises to be one of the few purely architectural shows in the biennale.
The challenge for the Venice architecture biennale in general is that just showing buildings in an exhibition space can be a deadly bore. The real problem for architecture exhibitors is how to occupy the space between architecture and exhibitions—and the fact that what architects should be doing is designing for unique conditions.
I’ll have more on that note from the biennale tomorrow.

UPDATE: Get the full story, including renderings, on our main page.
Well into its second decade, P.S.1 and MoMA's Young Architect's Program looked just south of its Queens home for this year's winner, selecting Brooklyn's SO-IL Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu to design the now famous summertime pavilion in the P.S. 1 courtyard. They beat out two fellow Brooklynites, Freecell and Easton + Coombes, Cambridge's William O'Brien, Jr., and a dark horse Danish contender BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. Renderings will be released at a MoMA event tomorrow, but a press release describes their entry thusly:

Conceived as a participatory environment that reframes the conceptual relationship between humankind and structure, Pole Dance is an interconnected system of poles and bungees whose equilibrium is open to human action and environmental factors. Throughout the courtyard, groups of 25-foot-tall poles on 12 x 12-foot grids connected by bungee cords whose elasticity will cause the poles to gently sway, creating a steady ripple throughout the courtyard space.

While still young, SO-IL is no stranger to success. The firm recently completed a new atelier for Derek Lam above his SANAA-designed showroom on Crosby Street in Soho, and plans are in the works for a trippy green roof not far from P.S. 1 in Sunnyside, Queens. Idenberg's best known work is with another museum, however, as he was the project manager on the New Museum.

I returned to the giardini from my afternoon spritz to find this pop-up tent in front of the U.S. pavilion- a perfect spot given the theme of Teddy Cruz’s image of the border. It apparently has been migrating around the garden all week and was gone in an hour.